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More on the horizon Once VR/AR has become a proven market

with consumer interest, the real estate industry could see some truly dramatic innovations, including hyper-specific analytics, more

interaction with existing properties, and even whole virtual marketplaces.

One of the first possibilities Tepper sees coming is the ability to collect and mine the data from virtual walkthroughs for more targeted marketing. “If somebody has a VR model and it’s viewed twenty

times,” he says, “we’ll have the capability at some point or the technology to say, ‘OK, 90% of the time was

spent on the office or the conference room. So, what can we do with that data? Could we maybe serve up that data first?’”

In the AR sphere, AR Pandora Reality is getting things off the ground with technology that allows customers to use their smartphones and tablets

to examine miniature virtual models of new real estate projects as if they were positioned on a real-world desk or table in front of them, and

they can also use it to project virtual finishes and furnishings into existing spaces to see how they

might look. The company is already working on demo versions of its product for developing AR

headsets such as the Hololens, but it’s waiting for the technology to become sleeker and cheaper

before it seriously rolls things out. “Software-wise, we’re quite ahead of the curve,” founder Alper Guler says, “and we’re waiting for new toys to come out to amaze people.”

The technology’s already here “Real estate, architecture, and design are already working with 3-D models, and VR and AR are, in essence, just an extension of that process,” says Chad Eikhoff, founder of Last year, he and his team released Floorplan Revolution, a product that can create an

interactive virtual 3-D model of a space from nearly any two-

dimensional floorplan, not just detailed architectural drawings.

Atlanta-based TRICK 3D, one of several companies that’s already getting in on the ground floor of real estate’s VR/AR transformation.

16 The Occupier Edge